The Icinga Project released a major milestone of their new Icinga 2 monitoring solution. Compatible with common databases, web interfaces and addons, the drop-in replacement to Nagios and Icinga 1.x. delivers higher performance and a configuration migration script.

Online PR News – 12-November-2013 – International – The Icinga Project released a major milestone of their new Icinga 2 monitoring solution for download. Beyond full compatibility with common databases, web interfaces and addons, Icinga 2 v0.0.4 delivers higher performance, a cluster stack and configuration migration script, making it a suitable drop-in replacement to Nagios and Icinga 1.x.

Progressing on their development of a new monitoring solution, the Icinga Project presents a formidable substitute to Nagios and Icinga 1.x with their major Icinga 2 v0.0.4 milestone release. Compatible with MySQL and PostgreSQL databases, Classic UI and Icinga Web interfaces as well as existing community addons and plugins, Icinga 2 is now capable of comprehensive monitoring in most environments.

Equipped with multiple backends, popular addons can easily be integrated into Icinga 2. This includes support for IDO DB with MySQL or PostgreSQL as database backends, Livestatus (e.g. Thruk, Nagvis), a performance data writer (e.g. PNP4Nagios, InGraph) and direct output to Graphite.

In contrast to its predecessors however, Icinga 2 enables such multi-functional monitoring environments without compromising performance. Individual features can be enabled and disabled using the “icinga2-enable-feature” and “icinga2-disable-feature” commands.

The true performance gains however, are due to Icinga 2’s multi-threaded architecture that runs checks, notifications, and event handlers in parallel. “Benchmark tests have shown that a single Icinga 2 instance can run 120,000 active checks per minute, and even more with passive checks. At those speeds, you can easily monitor thousands of hosts and services with just one instance – that’s what I call next generation monitoring”, enthused Michael Friedrich, Icinga 2 developer.

“But performance is just one side of the equation, with Icinga 2 we also want scalability,” added Gunnar Beutner, Icinga 2 developer. To this end, Icinga 2 enables cluster stacks for distributed systems monitoring out-of-the-box. Tasks such as checks, notifications and commands are distributed to instances with automated load balancing and replication of configuration and program states. This is supported by SSL to guarantee secure communication between instances.

“When it comes to performance and scalability, Icinga 2 is leaps and bounds ahead of the game. We welcome users to test it for themselves – and now with our demo VMs, comprehensive docs and auto-built packages it couldn’t be easier,” affirmed Bernd Erk, Icinga project coordinator.

To further simplify Icinga 2 installation, a configuration migration script for Icinga 1.x and Nagios users is also included in the software release.

Previously announced features such as business process monitoring and a backend for logs are currently undergoing development. The project has opted for relatively short development cycles, with two major technology milestone versions planned for next year. As they work towards a stable version, the developers invite users to test each release.

For more information, Icinga 2 and the Icinga Project is found at: www.icinga.org
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About Icinga
Icinga is an enterprise grade open source monitoring system which keeps watch over a network and any conceivable network resource, notifies the user of errors and recoveries, and generates performance data for reporting. Scalable and extensible, Icinga can monitor complex, large environments across dispersed locations. Icinga is a fork of Nagios and is backward compatible.

Though Icinga retains all the existing features of its predecessor, it builds on them to add many long awaited patches and features requested by the user community. This has culminated in standout features such as PostgreSQL and Oracle database support, improved extensibility through robust REST and plugin APIs as well as a user-friendly, dynamic web interface.

About Icinga 2
Icinga 2 is a new, redesigned open source monitoring solution currently under development. As a core framework replacement (no GUI) it seeks to build on the success of Icinga 1.x and overcome limitations inherited from Nagios. Built from scratch and based on C++, Icinga 2 will feature a new user-friendly, object-based configuration format; a new service and agent-based monitoring model; greater interoperability thanks to an RPC interface as well as efficient scaling in large environments.
In contrast to its predecessors, Icinga 2 runs on current and older *NIX platforms as well as Windows. It is also backward compatible to Nagios and Icinga 1.x, with built-in compatibility layers for its use with both Classic UI and Web interfaces. As a parallel development branch to Icinga 1.x however, Icinga 2 is currently only intended for testing purposes.